A Fancy Phone Box to Help You Unplug

It sounds frivolous, but design is undeniably powerful when it comes to shaping habits.

photo: Stolp

Marie Kondo, the famous tidying guru, has partnered with a Belgian company called Stolp to release a product designed to “press pause on digital noise.” It’s a box—a very expensive box—that resembles an opaque, matte butter dish. You put your phone inside, which hides it from view and keeps it temporarily from reach. Perhaps most interestingly, the box blocks all signals, so when your phone is in the box, you won’t get any text messages or calls.

Now, it does seem silly to spend €129 (US$140) on something that does exactly the same thing as putting your phone on airplane mode. To be clear, I don’t plan on buying one because I don’t have that kind of money burning a hole in my pocket. (Nor am I beholden to Stolp in any way; we haven’t communicated.) But I’ve been thinking that maybe this concept isn’t as frivolous as it seems at first glance.

For one, it acknowledges the eerily obsessive pull of the smartphone, which is something most people don’t like to admit. We prefer to believe that we can override the urge to reach for our phones frequently throughout the day and night, and that every time we do, we are choosing to do so. In reality, we often reach for them mindlessly and habitually, just because we see them lying there, inviting us to partake in a pleasurable hit of dopamine.

The Stolp box recognizes that design is a powerful tool for shaping the environments we live in, and that when something like a smartphone is out of sight, it increases the odds that it’ll be out of mind, too—not a guarantee, but a tangible aid.

As the company explains, airplane mode and Do Not Disturb settings create an illusion that we can forget about our phones and focus on real life, but research doesn’t support that. Stolp says that awareness of a phone’s presence erodes focus by 20%.

“It’s as if these devices keep our brain ‘hooked’ as long as they’re around. The ‘out of sight, out of mind’ principle is critical as we want to break with the habit of ‘always-on.’”

Unplugging Rituals

Reading about this Faraday cage for phones got me thinking about how having an “unplugging ritual” could go a long way toward curbing unhealthy phone use habits and boosting well-being. Even if it’s not an exorbitantly pricey box, there are things we can do in our daily lives that create healthy friction and distance between us and our devices.

Johann Hari, who wrote Stolen Focus, is a huge fan of the kSafe, which has a timer to keep his phone locked up for however many hours he selects. It’s like a more extreme version of the Stolp box.

Some people talk about coming home from work and placing their phone in a drawer, indicating the end of one part of the day and the start of another. I also tend to hide my phone away, on silent. I slide it between stacks of dinner plates on a kitchen shelf, as opposed to leaving it face-up on the kitchen island where I’m more tempted to use it. I often try to leave it upstairs or downstairs or out in my backyard office—away from wherever I am.

A common practice is to charge a phone overnight in a different room—and buy an alarm clock to use in the bedroom. There’s the well-known Tech Sabbath approach, where all devices in a household get powered down for 24 hours a week. I like the idea of dedicated smaller chunks of rest, such as phone-free evenings or weekend mornings, and of course, phone-free meals and outdoor walks.

Author Celeste Headlee has a good rule about not checking social media during work hours. For her, 9 am to 5 pm are off-limits when it comes to using any social media apps, and I started to do the same when I found myself checking Instagram too frequently during lulls in my day.

Some opt to “boring-ify” their phones, turning the screen to a dull greyscale and removing any background photo that might be tempting to look at.

Another curious piece of advice I read was to put a hair elastic around the middle of your phone. You can still answer calls, but the elastic gets in the way of scrolling and texting. Sure, you can move it easily enough, but it acts as a slight physical impediment that might cause you to reconsider whether you really need to do what you’re doing.

Adults Need Help, Too

Photo: Stolp

It is worth remembering that adults struggle differently than kids when it comes to screen-time habits. There is no parent holding us accountable anymore, yelling at us to get off our phones, implementing time limits, or threatening to confiscate our devices if we don’t get our work done first. A few people may not have an issue with this, but many do. Adults may benefit from creating structural changes in their lives to support unplugging efforts, whether it’s rituals or physical aids.

I keep picturing the Stolp box in my kitchen, wondering what would happen if guests came over for a dinner party and I asked everyone to stack their phone inside for the duration of the meal. No doubt there’d be surprise, resistance, irritation—but would that shift into appreciation after the fact? Perhaps gratitude for having been given a full evening of undivided focus and presence? Unplugging then becomes a communal effort, the challenge and rewards shared by all.

I do like how the box is a visual reminder of what needs to happen, more so than the vague awareness that a phone can, hypothetically, be set to airplane mode (but no one really does it, unless compelled). The box is in our face, telling us to do this thing, to commit and show up to life.

Even Marie Kondo, who shockingly admitted last year that she’d “kind of given up” on tidying now that she has three young children, says her focus has shifted more toward mental clutter than physical. She told Vogue, “It’s not just your environment, it’s also important to tidy your mental state of mind. I think it’s important that… we re-examine how we spend and allocate the time through our digital devices.”

We need rituals and accountability for many things in life, and screens are no exception. These can take many forms, and it’s up to us to figure out what fits best into our lives.

I am curious to hear from readers. Do you have an unplugging ritual? How do you distance yourself from your device? What do you think of the Stolp box—brilliant or superfluous?

You Might Also Like:

Yes, Please Talk to My Kid!
Adult Screen Resolutions for a New Year
It’s the Adults, Not the Kids

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